In October 1973 – 40 years before the events of October 7, 2023 – war broke out in the Middle East. The Egyptian army launched Operation Badr, crossing the Suez Canal and capturing the Bar Lev Line, a fortified sand wall on the east bank of the canal.

Palestinian refugees were full of hope that their land would soon be liberated and they would return to the homes from which Israel had expelled them. That did not happen. Instead, after the end of the war, Arab leaders sued for peace with Israel.

A few months later, the Palestinian satirist Emile Habibi, published his novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptomist, a metaphorical critique of the Palestinian reality. The novel tells the story of Saeed, a Palestinian who lost his village in the Nakba of 1948. Amid the misery of dispossession and occupation, he wanders through the world with his head bowed in case he finds a shekel on the street to cheer him up.

I wake up every day trapped in the world of Saeed. The mass death in Gaza continues. Yet I must search for a penny on the ground, a signifier of better things to come. Could the January 26 ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) be that?

On December 13, Al Satar Al Sharki, the eastern part of my city, Khan Younis was subject to a ground invasion by the........

© Al Jazeera